Awesome: DOE Has No Idea What Happened to $500,000 in Stimulus Cash

Solyndra, Fisker… If you thought nightmare stimulus fallout couldn’t get worse, you thought wrong. An audit by the Department of Energy concluded that the agency has no idea what happened to $500,000 worth of stimulus cash granted to an unnamed company. The recipient failed to keep adequate records, and so the money has basically disappeared. Half a million dollars, and nothing to show for it.

The program was given nearly $2 billion in stimulus funds “to support the construction of U.S. based battery and electric drive component manufacturing plants.” As of June, DOE had “expended” about $1.2 billion of that money and had made grants to “30 for-profit manufacturers,” according to the July 10 audit report.

One of the three “conclusions and observations” the OIG made in the report is that more should be done to “ensure recipients adequately safeguard equipment purchased with federal funds,” the audit states.

“We were unable to locate equipment purchased by one recipient totaling about $500,000,” the audit states.